Writing

Writing and Music

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Image from AlexVan on Pixabay
Image from AlexVan on Pixabay

When I write fiction and really want to focus, like many people I like to listen to music. To this end, I’ve discovered that there are three different broad categories of music that work for me:

  1. All-purpose writing music
  2. Mood music
  3. Project-specific music

For the first category, I like classical and early music (medieval/renaissance/baroque). This generally is music that either has no lyrics or the words are in another language so it’s not “sing along” music. Most of the time I get distracted by music with lyrics that I know and am more tempted to actively engage with the songs than actually get writing done. Some of my favorites here include Debussy, the flute music of Seamus Egan, the Baltimore Consort, and the music of Philip Glass, which also is something I frequently turn to when I am trying to visualize a scene.

When I say “mood music” it’s music that helps me set a general tone for the work. If I’m writing about characters in a dance club, I might listen to music that evokes that kind of setting. For scenes that are supposed to be disturbing—for example, in my current work, that might be nightmares that I’m describing—I like classical music in lower ranges or that are a bit atonal.

In this category I’m also discovering soundtracks to be useful. The music from Doctor Who, the TV show Merlin, and the Hobbit all are on this list because of the memories/images they evoke in me and how those emotional responses translate into writing. And recently, I’ve added the soundtrack to The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is excellent.

From Wikipedia
From Wikipedia

My favorite is the third category. As I write, there are songs that evoke a certain feeling, or that are referenced in some way by my characters, and over time the songs take on meaning. For my current project, I include in this list Fiona Apple’s version of Pure Imagination, which I think would be a great song to open the movie version of this novel, should I be so lucky. (I disregard the fact that the accompanying video was made as a commercial). I also include in this list the original Singing in the Rain since one of my characters sings it, and Benny Goodman’s Sing Sing Sing, which I envision is playing by the band in a dream sequence.

Thanks to Spotify, I am always exploring new “soundtracks” that aid in the writing process. I’d love to hear what music others find particularly helpful, and why.

Unexpected inspiration

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You have to grab good ideas when they find you, or they’ll pass you by and someone else will get them.

Someone, I think a musician, said something along these lines, and the idea stuck with me. You never know when you’ll be struck with inspiration, and you need to be able to capture it or it will fly away.

For several months, since December or January, I’ve been struggling with a major plot point in the novel I began for NaNoWriMo. As I edited the novel, the hole became more and more glaring, and no matter how I tried to fix it, nothing felt right. Night after night I tried to come up with a solution, writing lots of bits I later cut, and redoing the previous chapters to try to make something work. All these attempts, however, were failures. Nothing clicked.

It got so discouraging that I had a hard time staying motivated to finish the project, and caught myself dragging my feet when it was supposed to be writing time.

This week, I gave myself permission to set that struggle aside for a month. With Camp NaNoWriMo beginning on Tuesday, I decided to write backstory about my characters, inventing scenes with them that happen before the main story of the novel itself. It’s been an interesting and somewhat fruitful exercise in general, but over the past few days, I haven’t produced anything particularly noteworthy.

Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
Today was opening day for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and I was lucky enough to get to see it this afternoon. As I was watching the pre-show, my mind wandered, in that idle meandering way of a writer. Because I had written about him last night, my thoughts turned to my protagonist, about whom I had learned some intriguing tidbits. Thinking I might want to keep writing about him tonight, I asked myself, would he like going to see movies? How would he feel if he found himself sitting next to a perfect stranger, as I was doing?

All of a sudden, my synapses started firing. And then… there it was. The epiphany I had sought for all these months, the golden lightbulb moment. I suddenly knew exactly how to fill in this missing section and get my character from point A to point B, all while tying together other important plot elements.

The amazing thing about it was, none of this happened during the movie itself. It all took place in a matter of seconds as the previews ended, during the brief warnings to turn off your cell phone and not talk during the movie.

So it just goes to show… you never know where or when inspiration will happen, and never really productive to try to force it.

Postscript: Captain America:TWS was a fun movie. Lots of action and good looking men and women, but remarkably, there was actually a decent, logical (well, mostly) plot, which is becoming a rarity for action movies in the 21st century.

Beer and Writing

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10169162_10203552677754527_1806189607_nFounders Kentucky Bourbon Stout brewed with chocolate and coffee and aged in oak bourbon barrels.

As soon as I heard about this beer, a limited seasonal beer produced by Founders Brewing in Grand Rapids, MI, I knew I wanted to try it. Doing my due diligence, I learned it was supposed to be released on April 1 here in Austin, and I was prepared to go to my local “beer store” to grab some before they sold out. I’m friends with this particular store, Sunrise Minimart, on Facebook, and that’s how I learn about all of the cool new craft beers that they get.

Except they got the beer a few days early and although they posted an announcement on Facebook, Facebook decided I didn’t need to see that particular post, so by the time I realized what had happened, it was all gone.

It was a fail on the scale of Greek tragedies.

And then, a fellow homebrewer posted a photo on Facebook yesterday with, you guessed it, a four-pack of KBS. I commented on his good fortune, and he let me in on a great secret…

He had purchased extra!

Tonight, instead of writing as I had intended, I spent the evening drinking some amazing craft beers, including the KBS, which was just as amazing as you might expect from a beer with chocolate and coffee and aged in bourbon barrels. Words really can’t do it justice. The coffee is subtle but the chocolate is so rich, and the taste of whiskey is just the perfect compliment to the other flavors.

Oh right, words. I mentioned that I was supposed to be writing.

Well it’s late, and I’ve been relaxing and drinking beer. Most people in my sitiation would say, meh, I’ll skip it for tonight and pick it up again tomorrow. But not me. I signed up for Camp NaNo with the intention of writing every single day, and then agreed to a blogging challenge with a similar goal. It’s only April 3rd… I don’t want to be branded as a slacker on the third day!

So here, with less than an hour to go, I’m squeezing in my daily blog post.

As soon as I hit publish on this post, I’ve got some fiction to write before the clock strikes midnight, so I can log a word count for April 3rd. The good thing is that I’ve already decided that I want to continue to explore the history of one of my protagonists, and have several scenes already floating in my head. I’ve also decided that at some point he’s going to find an excuse to drink a nice craft beer. 🙂

Camp report: Writing by dictation

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I got off to a great start with Camp NaNoWriMo! I started writing at midnight last night, then I wrote again at a writers meet up yesterday evening, and as a result had logged over 3000 words for the day.

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Then I realized I should do some more writing later, after midnight, which is my normal time to write, so I’d be sure to have writing done for day two. I just didn’t feel like sitting in front of the computer. So I wrote a big chunk by dictating it into the speech recognition doohickey on my iPad and saved it in Google Docs.

That actually works pretty well, especially if you’re writing in first person and don’t need a lot of quotation marks.

It’s actually how I’m writing this post as well, although I’m writing it directly in the WordPress app on my iPad.

At any rate I feel like I got some really good writing done, with almost no typing and absolutely no handwriting. I was able to explore some of the motivations for one of my primary characters, by putting his history in his own words.

So that’s my report for today. If you don’t want to write, then talk to your iPad for a while. And then save it. Score!